Inception

Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a
third-generation onion routing
project of the Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally
developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of
protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day
for a wide variety of purposes by the military, journalists, law
enforcement officers, activists, and many others. Here are some of
the specific uses we've seen or recommend.

We need your good
Tor stories! What do you use Tor for? Why do you need it? What
has Tor done for you? We need your stories.

They protect their privacy from unscrupulous marketers and identity thieves.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
sell your Internet browsing records to marketers or anyone else
willing to pay for it. ISPs typically say that
they anonymize the data by not providing personally identifiable information, but
this
has proven incorrect. A full record of every site you visit, the text of every search you perform, and potentially
userid and even password information can still be part of this data. In addition to your ISP, the websites (and search engines) you visit have their own logs, containing the same or more information.

They protect their communications from irresponsible corporations.
All over the Internet, Tor is being recommended to people newly concerned about their privacy in the face of increasing breaches and betrayals of
private data. From lost backup tapes, to
giving away the data to researchers,
your data is often not well protected by those you are supposed to trust to keep it safe.

They protect their children online.
You've told your kids they shouldn't share personally identifying information online, but they may be sharing their location simply
by not concealing their IP address. Increasingly, IP addresses can be literally mapped to a city or even street location, and can reveal other information about how you are connecting to the Internet.
In the United States, the government is pushing to make this mapping increasingly precise.

They research sensitive topics.
There's a wealth of information available online. But perhaps in your country, access to information on AIDS, birth control,
Tibetan culture,
or world religions is behind a national firewall.

They skirt surveillance. Even harmless web browsing can sometimes raise red flags for suspicious observers. Using Tor protects your privacy by making it extremely dificult for an observer to correlate the sites you visit with your physical-world identity.

They circumvent censorship. If you live in a country that has ever blocked Facebook or Youtube, you might need to use Tor to get basic internet functionality.

Reporters without Borders
tracks Internet prisoners of conscience and jailed or harmed journalists all over the world. They advise
journalists, sources, bloggers, and dissidents to use Tor to ensure their privacy and safety.

Tor is part of SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can use to securely accept documents from and communicate with anonymous sources. Many news organizations use SecureDrop, including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The CBC, ProPublica, Dagbladet, and more.

Tor preserves the ability of people behind national firewalls or under the surveillance of repressive regimes to obtain a global perspective on controversial topics including democracy, economics and religion.

Citizen journalists in China use Tor to write about
local events to encourage social change and political reform.

Citizens and journalists in Internet black
holes use Tor to research state propaganda and opposing
viewpoints, to file stories with non-State controlled media, and to
avoid risking the personal consequences of intellectual curiosity.

Online surveillance:
Tor allows officials to surf questionable web sites and services
without leaving tell-tale tracks. If the system administrator of an
illegal gambling site, for example, were to see multiple connections from
government or law enforcement IP addresses in usage logs, investigations
may be hampered.

Sting operations:
Similarly, anonymity allows law officers to engage in online
“undercover ” operations. Regardless of how good an
undercover officer's “street cred” may be, if the
communications include IP ranges from police addresses, the cover is blown.

Truly anonymous tip lines:
While online anonymous tip lines are popular, without anonymity
software, they are far less useful. Sophisticated sources understand that
although a name or email address is not attached to information, server
logs can identify them very quickly. As a result, tip line web sites that
do not encourage anonymity are limiting the sources of their tips.

Human rights activists use Tor to anonymously report abuses from
danger zones. Internationally, labor rights workers use Tor and other
forms of online and offline anonymity to organize workers in accordance
with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even though they are within
the law, it does not mean they are safe. Tor provides the ability to
avoid persecution while still raising a voice.

When groups such as the Friends Service Committee and environmental
groups are increasingly falling under surveillance
in the United States under laws meant to protect against terrorism, many peaceful agents of
change rely on Tor for basic privacy during legitimate activities.

In the US, the Supreme Court recently stripped legal protections from
government whistleblowers. But whistleblowers working for governmental
transparency or corporate accountability can use Tor to seek justice
without personal repercussions.

A contact of ours who works with a public health nonprofit in
Africa reports that his nonprofit must budget 10% to cover various sorts of corruption,
mostly bribes and such. When that percentage rises steeply, not only can they not afford the money, but they can
not afford to complain — this is the point at which open objection can
become dangerous. So his nonprofit has been working to
use Tor to safely whistleblow on government corruption in order to continue their work.

At a recent conference, a Tor staffer ran into a woman who came from
a “company town” in the eastern United States. She was attempting to blog anonymously to rally
local residents to urge reform in the company that dominated the town's
economic and government affairs. She is fully cognizant that the kind of
organizing she was doing could lead to harm or “fatal
accidents.”

In east Asia, some labor organizers use anonymity to reveal information
regarding sweatshops that produce goods for western countries and to
organize local labor.

Does being in the public spotlight shut you off from having a private
life, forever, online? A rural lawyer in a New England state keeps
an anonymous blog because, with the diverse clientele at his prestigious
law firm, his political beliefs are bound to offend someone. Yet, he
doesn't want to remain silent on issues he cares about. Tor helps him
feel secure that he can express his opinion without consequences to his
public role.

People living in poverty often don't participate fully in civil society
-- not out of ignorance or apathy, but out of fear. If something you
write were to get back to your boss, would you lose your job? If your
social worker read about your opinion of the system, would she treat
you differently? Anonymity gives a voice to the voiceless.
Although it's often said that the poor do not use online access
for civic engagement, failing to act in their self-interests, it
is our hypothesis (based on personal conversations and anecdotal
information) that it is precisely the “permanent record
” left online that keeps many of the poor from speaking out
on the Internet. We hope to show people how to engage more safely
online, and then at the end of the year, evaluate how online and
offline civic engagement has changed, and how the population sees
this continuing into the future.

Security breach information clearinghouses:
Say a financial institution participates in a security clearinghouse
of information on Internet attacks. Such a repository requires members
to report breaches to a central group, who correlates attacks to detect
coordinated patterns and send out alerts. But if a specific bank in St. Louis is breached, they don't want an attacker watching the incoming
traffic to such a repository to be able to track where information is
coming from. Even though every packet were encrypted, the IP
address would betray the location of a compromised system. Tor allows
such repositories of sensitive information to resist compromises.

Seeing your competition as your market does:
If you try to check out a competitor's pricing, you may find no
information or misleading information on their web site. This is because
their web server may be keyed to detect connections from competitors,
and block or spread disinformation to your staff. Tor allows a business
to view their sector as the general public would view it.

Keeping strategies confidential:
An investment bank, for example, might not want industry snoopers to be
able to track what web sites their analysts are watching. The strategic
importance of traffic patterns, and the vulnerability of the surveillance
of such data, is starting to be more widely recognized in several areas
of the business world.

Accountability:
In an age when irresponsible and unreported corporate activity has
undermined multi-billion dollar businesses, an executive exercising true
stewardship wants the whole staff to feel free to disclose internal
malfeasance. Tor facilitates internal accountability before it turns
into whistleblowing.

Field agents:
It is not difficult for insurgents to monitor Internet traffic and
discover all the hotels and other locations from which people are
connecting to known military servers.
Military field agents deployed away from home use Tor to
mask the sites they are visiting, protecting military interests and
operations, as well as protecting themselves from physical harm.

Onion services:
When the Internet was designed by DARPA, its primary purpose was to be able
to facilitate distributed, robust communications in case of local strikes.
However, some functions must be centralized, such as command and control
sites. It's the nature of the Internet protocols to reveal the geographic
location of any server that is reachable online. Tor's onion services
capacity allows military command and control to be physically secure from
discovery and takedown.

Intelligence gathering:
Military personnel need to use electronic resources run and monitored by
insurgents. They do not want the webserver logs on an insurgent website to
record a military address, thereby revealing the surveillance.

To verify IP based firewall rules: A firewall may have some policies that only allow certain IP addresses or ranges. Tor can be used to verify those configurations by using an IP number outside of the company's alloted IP block.

To bypass their own security systems for sensitive professional activities: For instance, a company may have a strict policy regarding the material employees can view on the internet. A log review reveals a possible violation. Tor can be used to verify the information without an exception being put into corporate security systems.

To connect back to deployed services: A network engineer can use Tor to remotely connect back to services, without the need for an external machine and user account, as part of operational testing.

To access internet resources: Acceptable use policy for IT Staff and normal employees is usually different. Tor can allow unfettered access to the internet while leaving standard security policies in place.

To work around ISP network outages: Sometimes when an ISP is having routing or DNS problems, Tor can make internet resources available, when the actual ISP is malfunctioning. This can be invaluable in crisis situations.

Please do send us your success stories. They are very important because
Tor provides anonymity. While it is thrilling to speculate about undesired effects of Tor, when it succeeds, nobody notices. This is
great for users, but not so good for us, since publishing success
stories about how people or organizations are staying anonymous could be
counterproductive. For example, we talked to an FBI officer who
explained that he uses Tor every day for his work — but he quickly followed up with a request not to provide
details or mention his name.

Like any technology, from pencils to cellphones, anonymity can be used for both good and bad. You have probably seen some of the vigorous
debate (pro,
con, and academic) over anonymity. The Tor project is based on the belief that anonymity is not
just a good idea some of the time — it is a requirement for a free and functioning society. The EFF maintains a good overview of how anonymity was crucial to the founding of the United States. Anonymity is recognized by US courts as a fundamental and important right. In fact, governments mandate anonymity in many cases themselves:
police tip lines,
some adoption services,
police officer identities,
and so forth. It would be impossible to rehash the entire anonymity debate here — it is too large an issue with too many nuances, and there
are plenty of other places where this information can be found. We do have a Tor abuse page describing some of
the possible abuse cases for Tor, but suffice it to say that if you want to abuse the system, you'll either find it mostly closed for your
purposes (e.g. the majority of Tor relays do not support SMTP in order to prevent anonymous email spamming), or if you're one of the
Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse,
you have better options than Tor. While not dismissing the potential abuses of Tor,
this page shows a few of the many important ways anonymity is used online today.